Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

MLB

Why Jeter has to fear following in Mays’ footsteps

It has become the catch-all phrase for anything and everything that exceeds its shelf life in a spectacular way: whenever something that used to shine so brightly dims to the point of ordinariness. Or worse.

You’re a running back and you’ve lost half a step? You’re a sprinter who no longer has a finishing kick? You’re the lead guitarist for a rock-and-roll band and your solo licks don’t have the fiery impact they used to? You’re a lawyer who’s lost the stomach for the court-room fight?

You’re a fading hoops star who suddenly can’t make a lay-up?

Jason Kidd actually used the term last spring, when it became increasingly clear he would never again be able to execute the most basic chore of a game called “basketball” — putting the “ball” in the “basket”:

“Even Willie Mays fell down in the outfield,” Kidd said one day at the Knicks’ training facility in Westchester County, poking fun at himself.

Kidd was born in the Bay Area in March of 1973. It would be seven months later, in the bottom of the ninth of Game 2 of the World Series, that Bay Area icon Willie Mays would become a forever link to every athlete whose skills today aren’t what they were yesterday, when “Willie Mays falling down in the outfield” would become the description of choice for everyone who followed, for every star who overstayed his welcome …

For Joe Namath in a Rams uniform …

For Billy Joel needing backup singers to reach the high notes …

For Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro agreeing to do “Righteous Kill” …

For — dare we say it? — Derek Jeter trying to coax more life out of 39-year-old legs than 39-year-old legs were designed to give …

“Age has a way of catching up to everyone,” Willie Mays himself said in 2009. “Far as I can tell, nobody’s ever been immune to that.”

For Mays, ignominy officially arrived on Oct. 14, 1973, thanks to a high sky, smoggy air and a national memory that still recalled when he carried himself on young man’s feet. It started with irony: Mays was inserted into the game in the top of the ninth inning to pinch run for Rusty Staub, for even at 42, Mays looked like Jesse Owens compared to Staub, 13 years younger. He took over center field in the bottom of the inning; who better to help protect a two-run lead than the greatest center fielder of all?

Then Deron Johnson, pinch hitting for Blue Moon Odom, hit a fly ball.

History is cruel sometimes. There are more than 2,790 Google entries for “Willie Mays falling down in the outfield,” and few, if any, mention that Mets outfielders had been haunted by the haze all day. Cleon Jones — 11 years younger than Mays — totally whiffed on a similar ball hit by Joe Rudi in the first inning. Almost every ball hit above the stadium line had been an adventure.

But this was Willie Mays.

And Mays didn’t just lose the ball in the sun: He stumbled as he tried to locate it. Nineteen Octobers had passed since Mays had chased down Vic Wertz’s blast to the deepest part of the Polo Grounds; no doubt there were millions of onlookers who couldn’t stop thinking of that as they watched Mays wobble at the Oakland Alameda Coliseum.

Two of them were sitting in the NBC television booth.

“Boy, Curt, this is the thing all sports fans in all areas hate to see,” Monte Moore, the regular broadcast voice of the A’s, said to his partner, Curt Gowdy, as detailed in “Swinging ’73,” a fine book about that baseball season. “A great one playing in his last years having this kind of trouble standing up and falling down.”

“Ten years ago, he would have put that ball in his back pocket,” Gowdy replied.

And that — with the exception of one routine fly ball an inning later — was that for Willie Mays as a center fielder.

And that is what happens to the unfortunate likes of Jeter, whose skills may or may not have already started to decline but who is now shadowed — stalked, really — by the haunting images of his collapsed ankle last October, and by broadcasters studying his every stride now as he runs out a grounder, every time he tries to go first-to-third on 39-year-old legs.

It was no more graceful an exit for Joe DiMaggio, who realized he had to quit after Life magazine published a terribly unflattering scouting report prepared by the Dodgers and loaned to the Giants for the 1951 World Series. It was no less painful for Mickey Mantle, who saw his career batting average tumble from .309 after the’64 season to .298 by the time he retired four years later because decay and decadence had left him a whisper of the player he’d been.

Age, after all, is undefeated.

But neither of them became a symbol, created by one iconic baseball star, pitilessly mimicked 40 years later by another. Their feet might have been killing them by the end. Lucky for them, those feet — at the very least — kept them upright. In public view, anyway.